Best culture & civilization Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“But the further step, by means of which a civilization is given its quality or culture, is only attained by a process of cellular division, in the course of which the individual is differentiated, made distinct from and independent of the parent group.”

Mean Made Culture Courses Individual Given Process Parent Quality Steps Groups Civilization Independent Division Cellular

Book:Selected writings: poetry and criticism

Source: Selected writings: poetry and criticism

“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.”

Moments Stories Order Culture Moral Civilization India Complexes Tales Islamic Delicate Evident Conquest Discouraging Barbarians Invading Multiplying

Author:Will Durant

“By 3000 B.C. the art of Egypt was so ripe and so far advanced that it is surprising to find any student of early culture proposing that the crude contemporary art of the early Babylonians is the product of a civilization earlier than that of the Nile.”

Art Culture Students Products Civilization Contemporary Surprising Egypt Ripe Crude Contemporary Art Nile

Author:James Henry Breasted

“The main reason for civilization is that life is more comfortable. In a way, houses are there to protect us from rain, cold, and heat; cars are there to overcome distances. Culture is the exception. Music, art, and all of the different cultural expressions are not going in that direction. They're not about comfort; they're about understanding each other.”

Way Art Different Reason Life Is Culture House Understanding Car Expression Cold Comfort Civilization Protect Comfortable Rain Overcoming Distance Heat Exception Understanding Each Other

Author:Pipilotti Rist

“Civilization is over-rated, but there isn't much else.”

Culture Civilization

Author:Theodore Roethke

“The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends. It should be a place where each individual's dignity and self-respect is strengthened by the respect and affection of his neighbors. It should be a place where each of us can find the satisfaction and warmth which comes from being a member of the community of man. This is what man sought at the dawn of civilization. It is what we seek today.”

Source: Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965

“We not only speak but think and even dream in words. Language is a mirror in which the whole spiritual development of mankind reflects itself. Therefore, in tracing words to their origins, we are tracing simultaneously civilization and culture to their real roots.”

Thinking Real Whole Dream Spiritual Culture Speak Language Mankind Development Civilization Roots Mirrors Spiritual Development Tracing

Author:Ernest Klein

“No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.”

Men World Way Made Use Seems Earth Form Culture Understanding Term Nature Animal Darkness Century Taught Civilization Relation Plant Obstacles Enormous Wilderness Dogma Crystals Conceit Wildness

Author:John Muir

“If the world suffers from mental deterioration or from moral degradation, then something goes wrong at the very root of civilization or culture. Even though that civilization may drag out for a considerable period, it grows less and less vital and ultimately tumbles down.”

Ifs World May Suffering Culture Grows Moral Periods Civilization Roots Drag Degradation Deterioration

Book:Jawaharlal Nehru: Excepts from His Writings and Speeches

Source: Jawaharlal Nehru: Excepts from His Writings and Speeches

“The Ganga, especially, is the river of India, beloved of her people, round which are intertwined her memories, her hopes and fears, her songs of triumph, her victories and her defeats. She has been a symbol of India's age-long culture and civilization, ever changing, ever flowing, and yet ever the same Ganga.”

People Long Has Beens Age Song Culture Memories Victory Civilization Rivers India Rounds Defeat Symbols Triumph Beloved Intertwined Hopes And Fears

Book:Jawaharlal Nehru, an anthology

Source: Jawaharlal Nehru, an anthology

“We as a culture are forgetting that we are actually natural organisms and that we have this very, very deep connection and contact with nature. You can’t divorce civilization from nature - we totally depend on it.”

Culture Natural Forget Depends Civilization Connections Divorce Contact Organisms Very Deep Deep Connections

Author:James Balog

“I came to see that man finds meaning in his existence only through the active demonstration of his human self, a cosmos comprising the entire constellation of life's factors: culture, civilization, tradition, history, ideals, facts, physical conditions, one's mental state, the ecology, and so on.”

Men Humans Self States Facts Culture Existence Conditions Civilization Ideals Tradition Active Factors Cosmos Ecology Find Me Demonstration Constellations

Book:The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir

Source: The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir

“Many people who are going through the early stages of the awakening process are no longer certain what their outer purpose is. What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them. Some feel that they inhabit a no-man's-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives. Inner and outer purpose have not merged.”

Source: A New Earth (Oprah #61): Awakening to Your Life's Purpose

“In truth, the best long-term explanations about our ancient counterparts can be found in the paintings, sculpture, crafts, tools of utility, language and architecture left behind. These are the building blocks of civilization we call culture. These are what we call 'the arts.”

“What's true for us as individual humans is true for the civilization we create: a sprint culture, seeking ever greater speed and power in all things cannot endure.”

Humans Culture Individual Greater Civilization All Things Endure Seeking Speed Sprint

Author:Ed Ayres

“Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.”

“While [European] national cultures were concocted to distinguish one economic unit of capital from another, civilizational thinking was invented to unify these cultures against their colonial consequences. Islamic, Indian, or African civilizations were invented contrapuntally by Orientalism... in order to match, balance and thus authenticate 'Western Civilization'.”

Thinking Order Culture Economic Balance Civilization Consequence Western Indian Islamic Units Western Civilization Orientalism National Culture

Author:Hamid Dabashi

“It has been the White Race who has been the world builder, the maker of cities and commerce and continents. It is the White Man who is the sole builder of civilizations. It was he who build the Egyptian civilization, the great unsurpassed Roman civilization, the Greek civilization of beauty and culture, and who, after having been dealt a serious blow by a new Semitic religion, wallowed through the Dark Ages, finally extricated himself, and then build the great European civilization.”

“In the name of a greater civilization, we curse those who for the sake of their ambitious dreams, brought about the massacre of so many young lives. No matter how brutal the crime, you will always get glorification of its heroism and tradition from the eunuchs of bourgeois culture.”

Matter Dream Young Culture Names Greater Crime Civilization Tradition Sake Curse Ambitious Heroism Brutal Bourgeois Massacres Glorification Eunuchs Young Life

Author:Amadeo Bordiga

“A civilization is only a way of life. A culture is the way of making that way of life beautiful. So culture is your office here in America, and as no stream can rise higher than its source, so you can give no more or better to architecture than you are. So why not go to work on yourselves, to make yourselves, in quality, what you would have your buildings be?”

Way Giving Wisdom America Beautiful Culture Politics Quality Economy Building Source Higher Civilization Office Architecture Streams Liberalism Why Not Beautiful Life

Author:Frank Lloyd Wright

“I think the whole thing is kind of sad, honestly, in the same way that our civilization - particularly the consumers of pop culture - has grown so used to an emasculated, bare-chested leading man that something like simply growing a mustache can impress people.”

People Thinking Men Way Kind Whole Used Culture Growing Civilization Pops Honestly Consumers Impress Pop Culture Mustache

Author:Nick Offerman

“Most people are shaped to the form of their culture because of the enormous malleability of their original endowment. They are plastic to the moulding force of the society into which they are born. It does not matter whether, with the Northwest Coast, it requires delusions of self-reference, or with our own civilization the amassing of possessions. In any case the great mass of individuals take quite readily the form that is presented to them.”

People Doe Self Matter Form Culture Individual Force Born Cases Society Civilization Mass Originals Possession Enormous Delusion Plastic Coast Endowment

Book:PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Source: PATTERNS OF CULTURE

“Society in its full sense ... is never an entity separable from the individuals who compose it. No individual can arrive even at the threshold of his potentialities without a culture in which he participates. Conversely, no civilization has in it any element which in the last analysis is not the contribution of an individual.”

Lasts Culture Individual Society Civilization Elements Analysis Contribution Entity Threshold

Book:PATTERNS OF CULTURE

Source: PATTERNS OF CULTURE

“The psychological consequences of this spread of white culture have been out of all proportion to the materialistic. This world-wide cultural diffusion has protected us as man had never been protected before from having to take seriously the civilizations of other peoples; it has given to our culture a massive universality that we have long ceased to account for historically, and which we read off rather as necessary and inevitable.”

“The mystery school continued throughout the greater Egyptian civilization, which was the second age of humankind and later on into the third age of humankind when the Indian, Chinese, Japanese and Tibetan high cultures flourished”

Age School Culture Greater Mystery Civilization Thirds Ancient Chinese Indian Humankind Tibetan Egyptian Ancient Egypt Atlantis Egyptian Civilization

Book:Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap

Source: Surfing the Himalayas: conversations and travels with Master Fwap

“The coarsening of our culture towards violent death has more consequences than war. Tragically, this same culture has led to the death of 50 million unborn children in the last 40 years. I don't think a civilization can long endure that does not have respect for all human life, born and not yet born. I believe there will come a time when we are all judged on whether or not we took a stand in defense of all life from the moment of conception until our last natural breath.”

“We have not chosen this time. We cannot help it if we are born as men of the early winter of full Civilization, instead of on the golden summit of a ripe Culture, in a Phidias or a Mozart time. Everything depends on our seeing our own position, our destiny, clearly, on our realizing that though we may lie to ourselves about it, we cannot evade it. He who does not acknowledge this in his heart, ceases to be counted among the men of his generation, and remains either a simpleton, a charlatan, or a pedant.”

Source: Form and actuality

“At last, in the gray dawn of Civilization the fire in the Soul dies down. The dwindling powers rise to one more, half-successful, effort of creation, and produce the Classicism that is common to all dying Cultures. The soul thinks once again, and in Romanticism looks back piteously to its childhood; then finally, weary, reluctant, cold, it loses its desire to be, and, as in Imperial Rome, wishes itself out of the overlong daylight and back in the darkness of protomysticism in the womb of the mother in the grave.”

Source: The decline of the West

“The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible.”

Facts Government Culture Impossible Civilization Slave Ugly Horrible Contemplation

Author:Oscar Wilde

“The separation of sex from emotion is at the very foundations of Western culture and civilization.”

Culture Sex Emotion Civilization Foundation Western Separation Western Culture

Author:Shulamith Firestone

“The time has also come to recognize the painful truth that traditional Judeo-Christian moral values of pain and pleasure in human relationships have contributed substantially to child abuse and to the prevalence of physical violence in Western civilization.... The religious system upon which our culture is based holds that pain, suffering and deprivation are moral and necessary to save one's soul and make one a 'good person.' The crucifixion and scourging of Christ are examples.”

“It is very natural that every one who makes anything inside themselves that is makes it entirely out of what is in them does naturally have to have two civilizations. They have to have the civilization that makes them and the civilization that has nothing to do with them.”

Doe Two Culture Natural Creativity Civilization

Book:What are Masterpieces

Source: What are Masterpieces

“American cultural institutions seem so bent on preserving the values of "Western civilization," the mythical "Whitetown," that welearn about one another's cultures the same way we learn about sex: in the streets.”

Way Seems Values Culture Sex Race Education Streets Civilization Institutions Western Bent Western Civilization

Author:Ishmael Reed

“Without metaphor the handling of general concepts such as culture and civilization becomes impossible, and that of disease and disorder is the obvious one for the case in point. Is not crisis itself a concept we owe to Hippocrates? In the social and cultural domain no metaphor is more apt than the pathological one.”

Culture Social Cases Impossible Civilization Disease Concepts Crisis Metaphor Obvious Disorder Domain

Author:Johan Huizinga

“No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.”

Thinking Knows Men World Giving May Lasts Culture Black Race Virtue Conditions Circumstances Civilization Capable Surprise Oppressed Last Words

Author:Marcus Garvey

“In their overestimation of the role of civilization, the humanists misunderstand the primary forces of the world of primitive human drives with their untamable violence. With their optimistic view of the role of culture, they (the humanists) trivialize the terrifying, hardly solvable problems of mass hatred and of the great passionate psychoses of the human race.”

World Humans Problem Hate Humanity Culture Force Views Race Roles Violence Civilization Mass Hatred Passionate Optimistic Primaries Human Race Primitive Psychosis Great Passion

Author:Stefan Zweig

“It is generally admitted that the cultural values (humanization) and the existing institutions and policies of society are rarely,if ever, in harmony. This opinion has found expression in the distinction between culture and civilization, according to which "culture" refers to some higher dimension of human autonomy and fulfillment, while "civilization" designates the realm of necessity, of socially necessary work and behavior, where man is not really himself and in his own element but is subject to heteronomy, to external conditions and needs.”

“Madness in Civilization is a brilliant, provocative, and hugely entertaining history of the treatment and mistreatment of the mentally ill. Packed with bizarre details and disturbing facts, Andrew Scull's book offers fresh and compelling insights on the way medicine's inability to solve the mystery of madness has both haunted and shaped two thousand years of culture. Required reading for anyone who has ever gone to a shrink!”

“Man... is an inextricable tangle of culture and biology. And not being simple, he is not simply good; he has... a kind of hell within him from which rise everlastingly the impulses which threaten his civilization. He has the faculty of imagining for himself more in the way of pleasure and satisfaction than he can possibly achieve. Everything that he gains he pays for in more than equal coin; compromise and the compounding with defeat constitute his best way of getting through the world. His best qualities are the result of a struggle whose outcome is tragic. Yet he is a creature of love.”

“In a culture that gives men irresponsible power and women powerless responsibility, the advancement of civilization cannot be a serious goal.”

Men Giving Culture Goal Responsibility Serious Civilization Inequality Powerless Advancement Irresponsible

Book:American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie

Source: American Mom: Motherhood, Politics, and Humble Pie

“The seeds of civilization are in every culture, but it is city life that brings them to fruition.”

Culture Cities Civilization Seeds City Life Fruition

Author:Susanne Katherina Langer

“Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civilization, and moral and intellectual culture, our fathers found that the divine ordinance of government, in every stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common reason to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its objects, in the benevolent councils of the divine wisdom, the happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and higher morality.”

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Culture Quotes